Two Days #2
“And he has not gone to her?”
“He has not gone to her in person. He has been careful on that point. I should be very surprised if she has set eyes on him in nine months. But, Mrs Darcy, I should be equally surprised if she has had no word of him in that time. A man does not stay within a week’s ride of his wife for nine months without finding some means of letting her know he is alive. ”
“You believe they are in contact.”
“I believe it. I cannot prove it. I have watched her house at intervals for twelve weeks, and I have intercepted nothing that came to her in the post that could be construed as from him. But that is exactly what I should expect of a clerk careful enough to have eluded my best efforts for a twelvemonth. He would not write her a letter that the post might open. He would use a less obvious channel. There is a woman who brings the piecework from the draper on Cable Street and takes the finished work away again twice a week. There is a fishmonger’s boy who comes to the door on Tuesdays.
There is, as I mentioned, the neighbour woman on Sundays.
Any one of them could be the conduit. I have not been able to determine which, and I have not been willing to risk frightening the wife by attempting it.
If she suspects she is being watched, she will stop receiving him, and the chain is broken. ”
“But you believe the chain exists.”
“I should stake what reputation I have left upon it. If she sent word to him that he was safe to come, he would come. The question is what would make her send such a word.”
“What would?”
“I do not know. I have thought of it for twelve weeks. I have not been able to construct an approach that I could trust to land with her. I am a strange man at her door. Anyone I might send is a stranger at her door. The men of standing the earl might send are worse than strangers — they are gentlemen, and gentlemen do not visit Wapping houses unless they are coming to do harm.”
Elizabeth heard nothing else in the room.
But she did hear something in her own head. It came up out of her like a sentence she had been about to write down for weeks and had not yet had the paper for.
She knew, in her own body, what it was to be a wife who was carrying a man’s secrets.
She had been, for six months at Auchengray, a woman who could not write a true letter, could not speak her husband’s name in any household but her own, could not name what she was doing or whose name she was sleeping under.
She had carried it, and it had been the loneliest thing she had ever done.
And after she learned the truth, she had carried it still — because she loved her husband, because she was afraid for him, because it was the price of his safety.
She knew, also, what it would have been to be a wife whose husband had vanished into the country and was sending her, by some hidden channel, the small reassurance that he was alive.
She had it in her own body, the room in Wapping.
The piecework on the table. The Sunday neighbour.
The fishmonger’s boy on Tuesdays. The draper’s woman on her two days.
The watching, each visit, for the small alteration that meant a piece of him had arrived — the folded scrap in the bundle, the word from the boy, the slip from under the neighbour’s bonnet.
The carrying of him for nine months by such means.
The not being able to write back, because to write back would be to bring the hunters to her own door.
She knew, last, what such a wife would do, if the right person came to her door.
Not Pemberton. Not Richard. Not Hodges. Not Webb. Not a gentleman, not an officer, not a strange manservant.
A woman.
It was, in a perfect world, herself.
It was not, in this world, going to be herself, because she could not leave Matlock House without forfeiting the terms of her counter-petition and walking herself into Newgate within the hour.
But it had to be a woman.
She drew breath. The new gown made it harder than it had been a month ago. “Colonel?”
“Yes?”
“I need Jane.”
Richard twisted round to face her. Hodges, in his chair, looked up from the folio for the first time since the conversation had begun.
Webb, opposite her, set his hat down on the cushion beside him with the careful slowness of a man who had seen, before anyone else in the room, that something in the case had just altered.
“You… you want me to bring your sister?”
“I need Jane. She is unknown to Sterling. She is plausible at a Wapping door. She has the kind of face the clerk’s wife will open the door to.
She has, I have reason to know, more steadiness in a difficult interview than any of us in this room, including you, Colonel.
I shall brief her at once. We have two days. ”
“Mrs Darcy, what can you hope to —”
“Hear me before you tell me no. I do not propose to ask Jane to persuade the clerk’s wife to turn her husband.
That is not work Jane can do, nor work I can ask of her, nor even, properly speaking, work that ought to be done at a Wapping doorstep on a Saturday afternoon by a woman who has just met her.
I propose only that Jane persuade her to come and see me. ”
Richard narrowed his eyes. “Come and see you. You realise you are not, strictly, supposed to be entertaining Webb here either — though I decided the court has better things to do today than throw out the case over one unauthorised caller. But if you intend to make a parade of my father’s drawing room —”
“The reasoning remains sound. Who would notice or care if a woman from Wapping comes with my sister when she calls tomorrow? I am not going to ask the clerk’s wife to do anything but step into a carriage and come and sit with another wife who has been required to be silent on her husband’s behalf and who would like, very much, to be of use to her.
Once she is in this room, Mr Webb, the rest is mine. ”
“And you believe she will come?”
“I believe she will come if Jane is the one who asks. Jane is a young woman in a plain pelisse, not a gentlewoman in finery sweeping up to the door. She will sit on the woman’s doorstep, if she has to, and ask her to come and have tea with another wife who knows what it is to wait.
She needs only to persuade the clerk’s wife that no one means harm to her or her husband. ”
Richard crossed his arms. “And if she does?”
“Then she puts the woman in the carriage and brings her here. I am aware of what I am asking of my sister, Colonel. I once went to marry a stranger in a dark tower to save her. I am asking her to call on a woman in Wapping, which, I think, is not very much to ask by comparison. It is something I would trust no one else in London to do.”
Hodges closed the folio. “It is the only piece of intelligence we have left, Colonel. And the lady is correct as to who can use it. I had not thought of it from this angle. I do not see another door.”
Webb cleared his throat, a sound he had not made in the room until then.
“Mrs Darcy. If your sister will go, I shall give her the precise direction, the time at which the neighbour woman is most often absent, the approach I should advise her to take at the door, and the questions she should not ask in the first quarter of an hour. I will write it for her at once, if the colonel permits.”
“He shall permit. Will you not, Colonel? And you will wait in the carriage, to be sure of her safety, I hope?”
Richard glanced around the room, studying each face arrayed against him. His gaze went last to the small curve under Elizabeth’s shawl, which she had not moved her hands to cover, and stayed there while his jaw ticked.
“I permit it. I will also accompany her, in plain coat, on the box of the carriage. I shall not enter the house, but I shall be within reach of it. That is my condition.”
“That is acceptable.”
“You are not to write to Darcy of this until we have a result. He is two days from arraignment. He cannot sit in that cell with a plan he cannot affect.”
“I had not intended to write to him of it. I shall write to him of other things.”
“Good.”
Richard rose. Webb and Hodges rose with him.
Elizabeth, by a small strategy she had been working since they sat down, did not rise.
To stand at the close of the interview, heavy and slow, would cost her the dignity she had held throughout; she would rather be the one to hold the room.
She held out her hand to Webb instead, across the small distance between the sofas.
“Thank you, Mr Webb. I shall see you in court on Monday.”